Hadouken is originally a Street Fighter move, but as Imgur member Grimlockt pointed out 3 weeks ago, Japanese school-girls have been turning this Video Game attack into a meme http://imgur.com/gallery/LsgGd, since then it has been published on Huffington Post and Mashable and is waiting to be verified as a meme on knowyourmeme.

The general rules of creating a meme like Hadouken is that your main protagonist adopts a ‘street fighter’ pose and 1 or more individuals react to this by being thrown through the air. This is all captured on camera and Tadaaa ‘Hadouken’.

To create your Hadouken meme photo in your office you will need:

A camera set to -pre-capture

A camera tripod

A bunch of Volunteers

Basic Photoshop / Fireworks skills

Lighting (i.e: shooting in dark probably not the best)

A boss that allows you time to do this in work

Some smaller objects that can be thrown into the air to create an effect

You do not need an expensive camera, I shot these on an old Olympus Sp-55OUZ

Ideally it will have pre-capture or Manual settings

The camera settings i used for the SEO team shoot

Always run a tester session. We ran this 3 days before the real shoot and it made me understand when we should get the money shot and how to get it. The Gif is purely for the amusement of readers 🙂

The day of the shoot, I got the teams together and we planned the staged photos. The idea is to make it look as realistic as possible, so staging things like a door behind them propped open and paper thrown around to look as if a massive magic attack has just happened and been captured on film.

Here is how it was done.. I set up the shot. Opened doors. Told guys to jump on 1,2,3 JUMP and Katherine was asked to stay very still. Pre-capture / continuous shot set on camera and started shooting from 2 of the count-down. Touching toes in jump, gets the best height and overall look.

So, next i wanted to capture the Copywriters team. The idea was to mix it with office furniture. I must admit that this was not as impressive as it does not get the movement needed to create the overall atmosphere of the Hadouken attack. the Gif is funny though!

You can over-do the lighting additions.. oohherrrr

Gif of how it is done

Then it was the Online -PR team’s turn. My first thought was to do a double Hadouken with Peter and Ping in the center.

But it quickly became apparent that a focus on one attacker was the best course of action. We used papers and the open doors on this to show movement.

Gif of how it is done, this is at normal speed.

But i still felt that it needed more, so we decided to switch angles and shoot if from the perspective of the attacker – in this case Ping.

Then of course we had to get the SEO team involved and I was of course expecting big things from these guys.

Final Fantasy special

Of course Brett the owner of Mediaworks had to get in on it with a bit of Vadering. Here is how he deals with Johnny’s 12 month review

I hope you have enjoyed our little how to create a meme session. Please add links to your own Hadouken shoots.